Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PDF Constructing Quantum Mechanics Volume One The Scaffold 1900 1923 1St Edition Anthony Duncan Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Constructing Quantum Mechanics Volume One The Scaffold 1900 1923 1St Edition Anthony Duncan Ebook Full Chapter
https://textbookfull.com/product/quantum-mechanics-volume-1-2nd-
edition-claude-cohen-tannoudji/
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/
https://textbookfull.com/product/lectures-on-quantum-mechanics-
volume-2-simple-systems-2nd-edition-berthold-georg-englert/
https://textbookfull.com/product/lectures-on-quantum-mechanics-
volume-1-basic-matters-2nd-edition-berthold-georg-englert/
Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum
Mechanics 1st Edition Peter J. Lewis
https://textbookfull.com/product/quantum-ontology-a-guide-to-the-
metaphysics-of-quantum-mechanics-1st-edition-peter-j-lewis/
https://textbookfull.com/product/computational-quantum-mechanics-
joshua-izaac/
https://textbookfull.com/product/botulinum-toxins-in-clinical-
aesthetic-practice-3e-volume-one-clinical-adaptations-third-
edition-anthony-v-benedetto/
https://textbookfull.com/product/quantum-mechanics-for-beginners-
with-applications-to-quantum-communication-and-quantum-
computing-1st-edition-m-suhail-zubairy/
https://textbookfull.com/product/mathematical-foundations-of-
quantum-mechanics-neumann/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen 2019
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019909012
ISBN 978–0–19–884547–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198845478.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
Preface
How did physicists in the first three decades of the last century come to recognize that
they needed a new framework to account for a growing list of phenomena that they could
not account for with what we now call classical physics? That is the central question
of this book. To answer it, we analyze what we have identified as the main strands in
the development of this new framework. This first volume takes us from the late 1890s
to the early 1920s. The second volume will take us from the early to the late 1920s.
Our starting point can be compared to that of someone first encountering an arch. This
person will wonder how it was built and come to realize that it was done with the help of
a scaffold. If we think of quantum mechanics as an arch, we can likewise say that it was
put together with the help of a scaffold, provided in this case by elements of the theory
it replaced. By using the arch-and-scaffold metaphor in their subtitles, we acknowledge
the backwards-looking perspective we are adopting in these volumes.1 Decisions about
which strands in the development of quantum mechanics we cover in detail and which
ones we treat more cursorily (if at all) were informed by our assessment, in hindsight,
of their relative importance for the scaffold on which the arch was erected. However,
our analysis of the strands selected for detailed discussion is given entirely in terms of
insights and concepts available to the historical actors at the time. To find meaningful
historically sensitive answers to our central question, we scrupulously adhered to this
methodological principle.
The authors of two previous histories of quantum physics, Max Jammer (1966) and
Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg (1982a,b,c,d, 1987, 2000–2001), addressed
questions similar to ours and faced similar historiographical challenges. Our book,
however, is not only more explicit about the approach taken but differs from these earlier
efforts in several other respects. A reader familiar with these older histories will notice
the most important differences just leafing through the pages of this book and glancing
at its table of contents.
First of all, our choice of topics is more selective than either Jammer’s or Mehra
and Rechenberg’s. Without being selective, we would have had no hope of covering the
developments we cover at the level of detail we cover them in just two volumes. It took
Mehra and Rechenberg, depending on how one counts, six or nine volumes to cover
roughly the same period and Jammer only managed to do so in one volume by omitting
the derivation of most results.
1 The arch-and-scaffold metaphor for the development of scientific theories is presented and the historio-
graphical issues it raises are discussed in Janssen (2019). The metaphor was inspired by Alexander Graham
Cairns-Smith (1985, pp. 58–60), who used it to illustrate his suggestion that the complex nucleotides of RNA
and DNA were first assembled on minute clay crystals.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
vi Preface
2 For English translations and commentary, see Sommerfeld (2014a, 2014b) and Eckert (2014).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
Preface vii
work covered in Part One of this volume than on the developments covered in Part Two,
where, in some places, we worked almost exclusively from primary sources.
Research for this book was done in the context of a large international project in the
history and foundations of quantum physics that ran from 2006 to 2013. This project
was a joint initiative of Jürgen Renn’s department at the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science and the theory department of the Fritz Haber Institute, both located
in Berlin. The project led to the establishment of a series of conferences on the history of
quantum physics. After a small workshop in Berlin in the Summer of 2006 (HQ0), four
such conferences have been held so far: HQ1 (Berlin, July 2–6, 2007), HQ2 (Utrecht,
July 14–17, 2008), HQ3 (Berlin, June 28–July 2, 2010), and HQ4 (San Sebastián, July
15–18, 2015). We were involved with this Berlin quantum project from the beginning and
presented our work both at the original workshop and at all four subsequent conferences.
These presentations resulted in four papers, all on topics that will be covered in the
second volume of our book (Duncan and Janssen 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013).
A pair of papers on a topic covered in this volume grew out of the presentation we
gave at a conference to commemorate the centenary of the Bohr atom, held June 11–14,
2013 in Copenhagen and attended by many members of the Berlin quantum project.
These two papers are on the explanation of the Stark effect, the splitting of spectral
lines in electric fields, both in the old and in the new quantum theory (Duncan and
Janssen 2014, 2015). One of us co-authored a paper on Ehrenfest’s adiabatic principle
with another member of this large international collaboration, the Barcelona historian
of physics Enric Pérez (Duncan and Pérez 2016). These papers formed the basis for
parts of Sections 5.2 and 6.3 in this volume. We are grateful to Elsevier, publisher of
Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, and the Royal Danish Academy of
Sciences and Letters, publisher of the proceedings of the Bohr centenary conference, for
permission to use this material.
As indicated above, we wrote this book with the idea that it could be used for
courses in the history of modern physics aimed at undergraduate majors in physics or
beginning graduate students in the history and philosophy of science. We both have
experience teaching such courses. The past couple of years, one of us (MJ) has been
using drafts of chapters of this book to teach the history of quantum physics to an
audience of predominantly physics juniors and seniors at the University of Minnesota.
We are grateful to the students in these classes for their feedback.
Several sections in Part One of this volume were written with the express purpose
in mind of having students read them in tandem with some of the classic papers by
Planck (1900d, 1901a), Einstein (1905a, 1907, 1909b, 1916b) (all available in English
translation), and Bohr (1913b, 1913c, 1913d). Part Two likewise prepares the student
for reading many of the original papers of the old quantum theory (though many of these
have not been translated) as well as the four editions of the “bible of the old quantum
theory,” Atombau und Spektrallinien (Sommerfeld 1919, 1921, 1922a, 1924). An English
translation (Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines) of the third edition appeared shortly after
the German version was published (Sommerfeld 1923).
To encourage and support faculty in physics departments interested in offering a class
on the history of quantum mechanics based on the latest scholarship in the field, we
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
viii Preface
partnered with the Center for History of Physics and the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, both at the American Institute of Physics in College
Park, MD, to set up a website that will make supplementary materials for a course
based on our book available to students and instructors. This will include electronic
versions of the primary sources mentioned above, materials from the course offered at
the University of Minnesota, and selected images from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
Oxford University Press has set up a companion website featuring a series of “web
resources” with more detailed treatments of various topics covered in the book. The
URL for this companion website is: www.oup.com/companion/constructingquantum.
The present volume has two appendices with crucial background material on clas-
sical mechanics and spectroscopy. The additional information provided in our “web
resources” is not critical for understanding the main text of this volume. To give two
examples: one of these web resources is on classical dispersion theory and includes the
derivation of a key result Planck needed to derive a formula for the spectral distribution
of black-body radiation (see Eq. (2.7) in Section 2.3); another is on Woldemar Voigt’s
classical theory of the Zeeman effect, which played an important role in attempts to
account for the effect in the old quantum theory (see Section 7.2.2).
We are grateful to Gregory Good, Director of the Center for History of Physics, for
agreeing to partner with us in developing and maintaining this website in support of
our book, and to Sonke Adlung, our editor at Oxford University Press, for agreeing
to have the American Institute of Physics host a website connected to a book in their
catalog. The materials from the course on history of modern physics at the University
of Minnesota were developed as part of the project “Digital Essays in the History of
Quantum Mechanics” led by Robert Rynasiewicz of Johns Hopkins University and
supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant No. SES-1027018.
It remains for us to thank a number of individuals and organizations that made our
work possible. Our main debt of gratitude is to the Berlin quantum project. We wrote
parts of this volume as guests in Jürgen Renn’s department at the Max Planck Institute
for History of Science and we thank the institute for its support. One of us (MJ) has
been a regular visitor at the institute since its inception in the early 1990s and focused on
this book project in the Spring of 2016 during the second half of a sabbatical from the
University of Minnesota. This work in Berlin was supported by a Research Award from
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The recipient (MJ) would like to express his
gratitude to the foundation for its support. For arranging our stays in Berlin, we thank
Shadiye Leather-Barrow.
Most of the book was written in Pittsburgh where we have been getting together
regularly to work on the history of quantum physics. We started the actual writing
of this book in the Fall of 2015 when one of us (MJ) spent the first half of the
aforementioned sabbatical at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of
Pittsburgh. We thank the staff at the Center, especially its director John Norton, for its
hospitality and support. The company of Edith Cohen, Donna Naples, Ted Newman,
Max Niedermaier, and Merrilee Salmon has made our get-togethers in Pittsburgh all the
more enjoyable.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
Preface ix
Contents
List of plates xv
xii Contents
2.4 From the Wien law to the Planck law: changing the expression for
the entropy of a resonator 65
2.5 Justifying the new expression for the entropy of a resonator 71
2.6 Energy parcels or energy bins? 77
3 Einstein, Equipartition, Fluctuations, and Quanta 84
3.1 Einstein’s annus mirabilis 84
3.2 The statistical trilogy (1902–1904) 86
3.3 The light-quantum paper (1905) 94
3.3.1 Classical theory leads to the Rayleigh–Jeans law 94
3.3.2 Einstein’s argument for light quanta: fluctuations in black-body
radiation at high frequencies 96
3.3.3 Evidence for light quanta: the photoelectric effect 103
3.4 Black-body radiation and the necessity of quantization 107
3.4.1 The quantization of Planck’s resonators 107
3.4.2 Lorentz’s 1908 Rome lecture: Planck versus Rayleigh–Jeans 112
3.4.3 Einstein’s 1909 Salzburg lecture: fluctuations and
wave–particle duality 117
3.5 The breakdown of equipartition and the specific heat of solids at low
temperatures (1907–1911) 127
3.6 Einstein’s quantum theory of radiation (1916) 133
3.6.1 New derivation of the Planck law 134
3.6.2 Momentum fluctuations and the directed nature of radiation 138
4 The Birth of the Bohr Model 143
4.1 Introduction 143
4.2 The dissertation: recognition of problems of classical theory 145
4.3 The Rutherford Memorandum: atomic models and quantum theory 148
4.3.1 Prelude: classical atomic models (Thomson, Nagaoka, Schott) 149
4.3.2 Scattering of α particles and Rutherford’s nuclear atom 152
4.3.3 Bohr’s first encounter with Rutherford’s nuclear atom: energy loss
of α particles traveling through matter 155
4.3.4 Interlude: Planck’s constant enters atomic modeling
(Haas, Nicholson) 157
4.3.5 Planck’s constant enters Bohr’s atomic modeling 165
4.4 From the Rutherford Memorandum to the Trilogy 171
4.4.1 Bohr comparing his results to Nicholson’s 171
4.4.2 Enter the Balmer formula 175
4.5 The Trilogy: quantum atomic models and spectra 178
4.5.1 Part One: the hydrogen atom 179
4.5.2 Parts Two and Three: multi-electron atoms and
multi-atom molecules 185
4.6 Early evidence for the Bohr model: spectral lines in hydrogen and helium 196
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
Contents xiii
Appendices
A Classical Mechanics 385
A.1 The physicist’s mechanical toolbox (ca 1915) 387
A.1.1 Newtonian mechanics 387
A.1.2 Lagrangian mechanics 389
A.1.3 Hamiltonian mechanics 393
A.1.4 The adiabatic principle 402
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
xiv Contents
Bibliography 449
Index 481
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
List of plates
Plate 20 Max Laue (far left), Paul Sophus Epstein Plate 21 Karl Schwarzschild.
(to his left), Paul Ewald (far right), and other members
of Sommerfeld’s group in Munich in 1912.
1
Introduction to Volume One
1.1 Overview
This is the first of two projected volumes on the genesis of quantum mechanics, covering
developments from Max Planck’s work on black-body radiation around the turn of the
twentieth century to John von Neumann’s introduction of the Hilbert-space formalism
of modern quantum mechanics in 1927. This first volume deals with developments up
to the early 1920s. It is divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters.
In the chapters comprising Part One, we take a broadly biographical approach, tracing
the earliest stages of the development of quantum theory through the contributions of
three main protagonists, Max Planck (Chapter 2), Albert Einstein (Chapter 3), and Niels
Bohr (Chapter 4).1 The focus in this early period was on black-body radiation and—
starting around 1910 when Walther Nernst provided experimental support for a theory
proposed by Einstein in 1907—the specific heat of solids at low temperatures. These
were the topics dominating the discussion at the first Solvay Conference in Brussels in
1911 (see Plate 9), which was devoted to the fledgling quantum theory.
Part One ends with Bohr’s derivation of the Balmer formula for the spectrum of
hydrogen from a model of hydrogen and hydrogen-like atoms in the first part of his
famous 1913 trilogy. This model is a precarious combination of elements from classical
mechanics and electrodynamics and elements from quantum theory. Bohr’s success
with hydrogen led to a shift in focus in work on quantum theory to atomic structure
and spectroscopy. His model became the germ for what has come to be known as the
old quantum theory, which a little over a decade later was transmogrified into modern
quantum mechanics. This transition will be covered in Volume Two of our book.
Part Two of this volume deals with the old quantum theory. As in Bohr’s model,
atoms are treated as miniature solar systems in this theory, which made the analysis
of atomic structure amenable, as the astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (see Plate 21)
first realized in 1916, to sophisticated techniques imported from celestial mechanics.
The undisputed leader during this period, besides Bohr, was Arnold Sommerfeld
1 See Plates 4, 8, and 15 in the section between Parts One and Two for photographs of Planck, Einstein, and
Bohr, respectively.
Constructing Quantum Mechanics. Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198845478.001.0001
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
(see Plate 15), the author of Atombau und Spektrallinien (Atomic Structure and Spec-
tral lines), which became known as the bible of the old quantum theory and went
through four ever-expanding editions between 1919 and 1924 (Eckert 2013c; Seth
2010). Despite Sommerfeld’s central role, however, the biographical approach of Part
One is ill-suited to deal with the complexities of the old quantum theory, its various
refinements, and the confrontation with a wealth of new data, in optical as well as in
X-ray spectroscopy, and including the complicated patterns observed in the splitting of
spectral lines by electric and magnetic fields, both internal and external to the atoms.
The old quantum theory itself will therefore take center stage in the three chapters
comprising Part Two. In Chapter 5, we cover the principles the theory was based on, the
quantization conditions in their various guises as well as Bohr’s correspondence principle
and the adiabatic principle of Paul Ehrenfest (see Plate 8). In Chapters 6 and 7, we
cover the most important examples of the interplay between theory and experiment.
Chapter 6 is devoted to what were seen at the time as important successes of the theory,
even though several practitioners realized that some of these successes were incomplete.
In hindsight, moreover, other successes turned out to be largely accidental. With these
qualifications, the most important of these successes were the theory’s agreement with the
measurements by Friedrich Paschen (see Plate 2) of the relativistic fine structure in the
spectra of hydrogen and helium, with the systematic examination by Henry Moseley (see
Plate 22) of the X-ray spectra of the elements in the periodic table, and with the data of
Johannes Stark (see Plate 10) on the effect named after him, the splitting of spectral lines
by external electric fields, in hydrogen and helium (Duncan and Janssen 2014, 2015). In
Chapter 7, we turn to what at the time were acknowledged failures of the theory, notably
that it could not explain the Zeeman effect, the magnetic counterpart of the Stark effect,
or the intricate multiplets in spectra of atoms more complex than hydrogen and that it
gave the wrong value for the binding energy of helium. Like the successes, not all failures
were complete failures. In the case of the Zeeman effect, for instance, Sommerfeld and
others found empirical rules accounting for the line splittings observed under various
conditions in impressive quantitative detail. That the Zeeman effect was nonetheless seen
as a failure of the old quantum theory was because no consistent mechanical model could
be found that captured these empirical regularities.
In the balance of this introduction we give an overview, as nontechnical as possible,
of the contents of Volume One, identifying key players and their main contributions
and highlighting points we think are new or not given the emphasis they deserve in the
existing literature on the history of quantum theory.
challenge of finding this function. Initially, however, his primary objective was not to
find the black-body radiation law but to provide an electromagnetic foundation for the
second law of thermodynamics. Although Ludwig Boltzmann and James Clerk Maxwell
had argued decades earlier that the second law only has statistical validity, Planck still
believed it to hold strictly, admitting no exceptions, no matter how improbable.
Planck thought he had identified a conservative time-asymmetric microscopic process
in electromagnetism from which he could derive macroscopic irreversibility: a plane wave
that is absorbed by a charged harmonic oscillator (or resonator as he called it) and then
reemitted as a concentric wave. The inverse of this process is never observed in nature.
As Boltzmann pointed out to him, however, this is just because the initial conditions
for the inverse process are never realized. Maxwell’s equations, Boltzmann reminded
Planck, are time-symmetric, just as Newton’s laws, and hence cannot serve as the basis
for a derivation of the second law. Planck thereupon introduced the assumption of what
he called “natural radiation” to rule out initial conditions that would lead to violations of
the second law. Using this assumption, he could show that the total entropy of the system,
the sum of the entropy of the resonators and the entropy of the radiation, never decreases.
In this system, however, the entropy increases without changing the spectral distribution
of the energy. As Ehrenfest, who first drew attention to this problem, put it: “radiation
may over time become arbitrarily disordered—it certainly will not get any blacker” (1906,
p. 529; quoted in Klein 1970a, p. 238). The problem was that the radiation’s interaction
with the oscillators is such that it cannot transfer energy from one frequency to another.
To reach the equilibrium distribution, the system must be in contact with some other
body, a “speck of soot” [Kohlenstäubchen] as Planck (1906a, p. 66) suggested later or
the walls of the cavity, which will act as a heat bath kept at some fixed temperature.
This aspect of the second law, the approach to equilibrium normally associated with the
increase in entropy, could thus not be derived in Planck’s approach but simply had to be
assumed.
Planck’s approach, however, did provide a way to find the black-body radiation law.
The key result he needed for this was a relation between the average energy of an
oscillator with a certain resonance frequency and the energy density of the radiation at
that same frequency. With this relation and some basic thermodynamics, the choice of an
expression for the entropy of one of Planck’s oscillators as a function of its average energy
translates directly into a specific black-body radiation law. In this way, Planck (1900a)
recovered a law gleaned from experimental data by Paschen (1896–1897) and proposed
independently by Wilhelm Wien (1896) (see Plate 1) on the basis of a superficial analogy
with the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. Planck convinced himself that the expression
for the oscillator entropy leading to the Wien law (or Paschen–Wien law as it was
sometimes called in those days) was the only one compatible with the second law of
thermodynamics.
Right around that time, however, Otto Lummer, Ernst Pringsheim, Heinrich Rubens
(see Plate 3), and Ferdinand Kurlbaum, experimentalists at the Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt, the German bureau of standards, began to find deviations from the Wien
law (Kangro 1976). Reexamining his derivation of the Wien law, Planck realized that the
second law does not uniquely determine the expression for the oscillator entropy after
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/7/2019, SPi
all. He used the leeway the second law still afforded him to change the expression to
one giving a black-body radiation law that merges with the Wien law at high frequencies
and merges with a law proposed by Lord Rayleigh (1900b) at low frequencies. Planck’s
experimental colleagues quickly established that this new law fit the data remarkably well
at all frequencies. Planck had found Kirchhoff’s universal function, the Planck law of
black-body radiation.
«Le roy fit assembler à Lion tous les princes de son sang
et tous les chevaliers de son ordre et austres gros
personnages de son royaume: les légat et nonce du pape, les
cardinaux qui se trouvèrent en sa cour, aussi les
ambassadeurs d’Angleterre, Escosse, Portugal, Venise,
Ferrare et austres; ensemble tous les princes et gros
seigneurs étrangers, tant d’Italie que d’Allemagne, qui pour ce
temps-là résidoient en sa cour, comme le duc d’Wittemberg,
Alleman; les ducs de Somme, d’Arianne, d’Atrie; prince de
Melphe (il avait voulu épouser Catherine), et de Stilliane
Napolitain; le seigneur dom Hippolyte d’Est; le marquis de
Vigeve de la maison Trivulce, Milanois; le seigneur Jean Paul
de Cere, Romain; le seigneur César Frégose, Génevoi,
(Génois de Genova), le seigneur Annibal de Gonzague,
Montouan, et autres en très-grand nombre. Lesquels
assemblés il fit lire en la présence de eux, depuis un bout
jusqu’à l’autre, le procès du malheureux homme qui avoit
empoisonné feu monsieur le Dauphin, avec les
interrogatoires, confessions, confrontations, et austres
solemnités accoutumés en procès criminel, ne voulant pas
que l’arrêt fût exécuté, sans que tous les assistants eussent
donné leur advis sur cest énorme et misérable cas.»